Author explores what can be gained from darkness

Aspiritual exploration of darkness brings Barbara Brown Taylor to Houston’s Rothko Chapel — itself a tribute to light and dark, with a halo of light at the ceiling and the dark, deep panels dominating its walls.

An author and Episcopal priest, Taylor will begin the chapel’s “Spiritual Pioneers” series Sunday, addressing the role of darkness in spiritual life.

“My interest in darkness began when I listened to how much people feared it,” Taylor said.

In culture and in the church, darkness connotes a sense of depression, mistakes and misdirection, but Taylor affirms the value and balance found in these inevitable periods. “You only have two choices,” she said. “Embrace it or deny it.”

She embarked on “a yearlong process of redeeming the dark” ahead of the release of her upcoming book, “Learning to Walk in the Dark,” due out in April.

For Taylor, the light-dark dichotomy goes beyond spiritual metaphor. She talked to people whose experiences with darkness came profoundly, such as with blindness and trauma. She referenced her own move from “a city that was lit 24/7” to the natural darkness of nights in the country. (Taylor is a religion professor at Piedmont College in rural northeast Georgia and lives on a working farm.)

In the years since leaving parish ministry, her faith journey and practices have taken her beyond the traditional structures of church. Rather than seek- ing enlightenment and retreating from the dark, she considers what people may learn from lingering there.

“It’s not just something to get through but a place at which they confronted fear,” she said.

Her discussion of spiritual darkness, or “endarkenment,” fits within the Rothko series’ broader questions on finding meaning and truth in a shifting religious landscape.

Pew Research declared it “the rise of the ‘nones,’” when it reported last year that 46 million American adults have no religious affiliation. More than a third of the unaffiliated classify themselves as spiritual but not religious.

Taylor describes herself as a “huge defender of the spiritual-but-not-religious” but resists labeling herself with the popular phrase. “I’m spiritual and religious,” she said. Add to that Episcopalian (“I’m just too old to change!”) and Christian humanist.

Four other speakers will discuss the spiritual-but-not-religious in America as the “Spiritual Pioneers” series continues through December.

“People’s spiritual needs and identities are transcending formal religious structures in ever greater numbers,” said Emilee Dawn Whitehurst, Rothko’s executive director. “The Rothko Chapel has been at the epicenter of this transformation in Houston. This series is designed to shed light on this fundamental cultural shift that has taken place over the last 40 years and only seems to be gaining steam.”